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Outside. Nice green forest. The beaver was gone. Everything was as I left it last year.
So instead I found an old axe and used it to clear the old trees fallen on the paths. By old axe I mean in good condition yet 2 generations behind; and although the head was of really good quality it kept coming off the handle. A practical ax expert would just tell you you have to know how to hang your own handle to the ax head.
Although that sounded attractive for about a microsecond or two, I just got myself a brand new Fiskars Chopping Axe which was really so much more efficient yet shorter and lighter. I got the 23.5-inch one, which is the closest to the old 25-inch one I had been using. It's a tad short, but the only other choice is a 28-inch, which is really too long.
I also had some fun with the Craftsman Lawn Mower 917.288700 and did some maintenance on it, simple stuff like changing the oil and all the oil/gas/air filters.
The older Craftsman Tractor 917.256544 was out of commission but after removing the mower and adding a new battery that now makes a working tractor and I can attach it to my dumping cart.
The other thing I did was explore the 250 or so acres of forest, trying to match the deed description (in perch and rod units, no less) and I ended up with some nice tracks on Google Earth.
My main tool was mostly MyTracks, to record the tracks and upload them to Google Earth but eventually I also ended up writing my own Android Bearing app to compute the compass bearing between two marked points.
It's the first time I actually play with a GPS. On one hand it was nice as it actually worked fairly well it the medium-dense forest; on the other hand the precision wasn't that impressive -- the GPS generally indicated 8 or 16 meters for accuracy but it did not update fast enough when walking. Also the integrated compass on the phone was incredibly noisy with the reading typically fluctuating -/+ 10 degrees.
Finally I got quite a lot more done, including many many hours spent reading the vast content of TV Tropes, working on my Android apps (Bearing obviously, but Timeriffic, Brighteriffic and Flashlight got translated to French too and had many other improvements, without even mentionning Nerdkill) and much more.
Overall what made the biggest difference was having a real 24-hour almost-instant internet connection instead of a 33K modem line. In that regard, I must say the ARC booster antenna was incredibly good when combined with the aging Kyocera KPC650. Bandwidth ranged from 70/40 KB/s (down/up) down to 3 KB/s (in rain at night, it's really that weather sensitive) with a typical average speed of 15 KB/s when I was generally getting no signal at all without the booster antenna. I guess being in the middle of a forest, behind a hill and out of the official zone coverage doesn't help :-) The signal strength indicator was around -100 dBm without the antenna and up to -80 dBm with it.
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